Portland Public Schools Southeast Guiding Coalition School Boundary Review

Portland Public Schools (PPS) offers a wide array of focus programs and enrollment options for its 48,000 students across more than 80 schools. PPS was in the planning phase of opening a newly constructed middle school, reconfiguring K-8 schools to K-5 elementary schools, and re-locating focus programs, all of which had boundary change implications. To update boundaries, PPS needed a consultant to provide expert recommendations for a districtwide effort, undertake complex and closely scrutinized data analysis, and develop a stakeholder engagement process centered on racial equity and social justice—all during a global pandemic that confined many of us to our homes.

FLO’s work for PPS included developing broad recommendations for balancing student enrollment across the entire district and supporting the district’s Southeast Guiding Coalition (SEGC)—a group of parents, students, and principals. In 2019 and 2020, FLO completed a districtwide study of enrollment, programs, and capacity. FLO wrote a report released in July 2020 that evaluated districtwide enrollment balancing drivers, including racial equity and social justice, K-8 conversions, new schools, and over/under-enrollment. The report included a comprehensive review of PPS’s previous enrollment and program balancing efforts, current and future enrollment trends from existing Portland State University’s Population Research Center studies, facility utilization, access to focus programs, and opportunities and constraints for balancing enrollment across regions of the district.

In fall 2020, FLO and PPS convened the SEGC to evaluate options for establishing an attendance area for a newly built middle school, converting existing K-8 schools to elementary and middle schools, balancing high school feeders, and relocating and consolidating focus programs. FLO worked closely with the SEGC for two years to reimagine PPS’s enrollment policies and provide iterative boundary scenario modeling. To adapt to the challenges of a compressed schedule and the inability to hold in-person meetings, FLO supported PPS and the SEGC with virtually facilitated technical workshops and office hours, self-serve web mapping tools, and an online open house forum for gathering community input in six languages.

The SEGC provided its recommendation on schedule, which was presented to the board of education in January 2021 and adopted with minor amendments. PPS began implementing new school boundaries in fall 2021 with the opening of a new middle school in southeast Portland followed by additional phases of enrollment balancing through boundary changes and program relocation.